Translation

Karaoke.

Of course there are no fancy Carrie Oakeys. There aren’t even lyrics since record companies are rapacious vampire squids that demand kings ransoms and all sorts of clearances before you can even fucking translate songs. I love Malcolm in the Middle and I’d love to get the complete DVD/BD set of that show, but you can only get the first season because the greedy record companies are keeping it hostage.

Main Script.

You tell me, does having MC-kun calling his date “Miss Rukino” make any goddamn sense? If you want to adapt it for the English audience, just go the whole nine yards and have him call her “Saki”.

Hokay, I guess this is technically correct. But I’ll assume that you have to be a real strung-out, hard-core anime fan in order to actually figure out what she actually means. If you’re a casual viewer, I’d imagine you’re going “What is this, I don’t even…” right now. See the [gg] review for further explanation.

Yeah, uh, no. I took the liberty of taking two screen shots. Here’s before she goes to the prime minister’s mansion, and here’s after. Did she change anything? Is the translator blind or something? Spy-kun, or whatever his name is, is not talking about clothes. Instead he was saying she should look the part of the prime minister by conducting the communication from her official residence.

No subtitling what’s written on that prime minister… thingie. And I thought Aniplex of all places would do that, since it’s such a dramatic complement to the scene. Hell, it’d only take a few clicks of the keyboard since they didn’t actually TS any signs in this show. Oh wait, they expected the English-speaking audience to automatically know what those characters say, right?

This is one of the few instances where Aniplex wrote a better line than gg, who had it as, “It’s the duty of adults to become the soil from whence the new seeds sprout!”

What the shit? What is he going to do, use karate to take down all those space Nazis armed with guns? Go with “I know! I’ll fight without it!”

Other Observations

Darkie’s already said this before, but Holy Christ were these subs painful to watch. They think us neckbeards would buy any crap they put out, don’t they? I mean, just look at these:

And these are just some random lines I arsed myself into capping three minutes or so into the episode. I’m sure there are more cringeworthy ones.

Final Grade: B-

The only reason why this script didn’t get a C or worse is because they obviously had access to the original Japanese script, so the subs are very accurate. However, I can imagine why normal people look down on us anime fans. They see these subs and ask themselves “Do they actually enjoy this crap?” Hell, I should bump them down a grade just for expecting us to pay to watch these dogshit subs. Yeah, yeah, accuracy and junk, but accuracy should be the lowest standard you should aim for, not the be-all and end-all.

I was thinking avatar and name around the title section so people know what they’re getting into before reading onward (“Mean old Mr. Dark_Sage?! Nothx, gimme Koku”, for example). TheThing said that should be possible to add.

People who buy these either don’t know/think that there are better subs, or buy it to support the anime in spite of the subs. What I don’t understand is why they don’t typeset anything. Do they think it’s too much of a bother or something?